Sailbourne

Since I didn’t follow up on the 16 random things, I’m going to try this one.  It’s taking me a while to think of stuff; please do bear with me.

1. My hair is naturally curly, and also pretty thick.  This caused me problems when I was young, because I hated to brush my hair.  My mother had to cut mats out of it more than once.
2. I wrote my first story at the age of ten or eleven.  I gave the manuscript to my fifth-grade teacher and never saw it again.  (I moved to another city in the middle of that year, and she neglected to keep in touch with me.)
3. I have applied for and failed to get a job working at McDonald’s.  (Maybe I shouldn’t have gone to the interview carrying a copy of Arthur Koestler’s The Ghost in the Machine.)
4. I was born in Texas, but haven’t lived there since I was a few months old.
5. One of my worst-ever experiences as a writer was my one college creative writing class.
6. The only time I have traveled outside the continental USA was a trip to Victoria, BC in the summer of 2007.
7. As far as I’m concerned, the Star Wars prequels and A View to a Kill never happened.  I’m trying to figure out how to get rid of Star Trek made after “The Voyage Home” plus all the series made after the animated one.
8. I’m a fan of singer Chris De Burgh, but “The Lady In Red” (just about the only song of his that anyone in this country has ever heard of) is actually one of my least favorite songs.
9. I have had dogs, cats, hamsters and fish as pets; I really wanted a snake when I was little.
10. I have attended two different high schools and four different colleges; I have a diploma but no degrees.
11. I have created an alternate universe version of our world in the 1930s for the pulp adventure game I run.  Some of its history goes back thousands of years.
12. I’m left-handed but usually hold the pen the way a right-handed person does.
13. I love the smell of coffee but not the taste.  Despite the fact that I don’t drink it, I’m told I make quite good coffee.
14. My first paying job (aside from babysitting) was washing dishes for a motel diner.
15. My two main online identities — Sailbourne and Ayeshalan — are both names I created for RPG characters.
16. The first Doctor Who show I ever saw was “The Five Doctors” in the fall of 1984.  I actually understood that these five characters were the same character.
17. I’ve been to a live professional baseball game three times and a live rock concert once.
18. I was reading Agatha Christie when most kids my age were reading Nancy Drew.  I tried reading Nancy Drew a couple times but didn’t like it because there weren’t any murders.
19. I have two holes pierced in each earlobe and two tattoos.  I’d like to get one more tattoo, but no more piercings.
20. The one “domestic skill” I’m consistently good at is cooking.  I would like to master candy-making and mixology.
21. I learned how to write computer programs on a Commodore VIC-20 with a cassette tape drive.
22. I presently own three pairs of shoes.  I dislike buying shoes.
23. My Meyers-Briggs Type Inventory profile is INFP.
24. I have voted in six Presidential elections; always Democratic except in 2000.  Yeah, I voted for Nader.  It seemed like a good idea at the time …
25. The bulk of my ethnic hodgepodge is Northern Irish and Italian.  I do not lose my temper easily — but when I do, it can get really ugly.

Here’s the rules for my Facebook friends:
Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you.

It seems like 2008 was a really wild and crazy year for just about everyone we know — no less for Joe and I.  Before the memories fade too far into the distance, I thought I’d do a brief summary.  Then I can stash all the grief where it belongs — the past.

Q1 (Jan-March) — Black Cat, Giallo Hotel

It all started looking like Lilith had a cold — her nose was runny.  We gave it a week — the normal time for a virus to run its course — and took her to the vet.  It wasn’t a cold.  After some tests, it seemed likely that she had nasal lymphoma.  There was only one way to be certain it was cancer — take her to a specialist for a rhinoscopy.  We had the money for that.  We paid it, Lilith had the surgery, and we got good news and bad news.  Bad news: it was definitely lymphoma, it wasn’t really curable, and we didn’t have the money for things like chemotherapy.  Good news:  the rhinoscopy left Lilith feeling much better, almost as if she wasn’t sick at all.  We had some more time with her.  No telling how much.

At the same time, Joe was working like crazy on the last episodes of the latest, biggest, meanest Afterhell story:  “Bloodbath at the Giallo Hotel.”  The final installments went out over the podcast feed, and Joe compiled the story in time to send it off for the Mark Time/Ogle Awards.

Q2 (April – June) — Farewell, and a Mention

After six weeks of good health, Lilith took a bad turn for the worse in early April.  We and the vets did what we could, but there wasn’t much left.  At the end of April, we had her euthanized.  It broke our hearts.  After almost exactly ten years with us, she was gone.  Lilith had adopted Joe back in 1998, and he was always her person.  He has begun to tell her story in his own blog.

Not long after we said goodbye to Lilith, we got surprising news from the folks at the Mark Time/Ogle Awards.  Afterhell Volume 3: Bloodbath at the Giallo Hotel had earned an Honorable Mention Ogle award.

And at about the same time we realized that Kyouju wasn’t well.  More vet visits, more bad news and good news.  Bad news:  he had a hyperactive thyroid, not uncommon in older cats but relatively rare in a nine-year-old.  The treatment: radioactive iodine, involving a four-day vet hospital stay and four weeks of isolation and minimal contact with us.  The good news:  He was completely cured.  Even before we could let him out of his cage, he was putting the pounds he had lost back on.  Joe’s written about this in detail, too.

I’ll cover the second half of the year soon.